These days, the forecast for most web-based companies, and for the Internet economy in general, is "stormy weather ahead with lethal interruptions expected." Zoli is so upset (rightfully so in my view) with Technorati’s inability to provide service due to high volume that he recommends that big companies may need to buy it. While the idea has merits, surprisingly the biggies are also affected by the outage bug. Blogger outage and malfunction was rampant in the last two days – both planned and unplanned. Yahoo’s Myweb was down for some time, and Salesforce.com outages have become a routine affair.
I probably come from the old school. Outages of services are unthinkable – what happens to all those redundancies that are talked about and provided for? Today it looks like sites can be unashamedly down and are expected to be seen as carrying on with business as usual. Five years back, Weather.com showed how to rearchitect to make sure the site is neither slow nor down when the traffic reached 3 billion page views per year. With technologies improving, and the body of knowledge to maintain always-on sites increasingly available, its time the world shows no tolerance for outages. Anybody not able measure up should suffer the commercial consequences. With a track record like this, the on-demand world does not need any negative campaigning making a dent – their own actions are loud enough for discerning stakeholders to make inferences.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Very interesting - are you recommending beyond Six Sigma availability? What are the architectural changes made by Weather.com to reach that level of availability?
2 - Aaman
Interestingly, Blogspot is down right now
3 - Pat Fish
Yup. Couldn't get to that link at Blogspot. Illustrating the point of the post.
So far as I am concerned, if a site can't stay up the waaaay vast majority of the time it shouldn't even be in business.
You wouldn't see Pizza Hut of WaWa closing down just boom, because something isn't working. With a sign...heh..."temporarily down".
Time to put a little more entreprenural attitude in these sites.
4 - Steven Hilton
Regardless of the "body of knowledge" available, it costs *lots of money* to keep that kind of uptime.
Going from 99% (about 3 days downtime a year) to 99.999% (considered best case scenario, about 5 minutes downtime a year) uptime is a gigantic jump in cost.
That added cost has to be weighed against what would be lost during the downtime to see if it is actually worth spending all the extra money and resources to achieve that level of service. Sometimes, it isn't.
Read this: continuitycentral.com/feature
If three nines (8 hours/year) is good enough for retail, then technorati and blogger can be more tolerant than that.
How many technorati users are willing to pay actual cash dollars for the service, to fund the cost of the increased uptime? Not enough, I can assure you. It's not magic that keeps sites up. It's not laziness or incompetence that makes sites go down. It's money.
A network can be intentional built to provide 99.9% uptime (instead of 99.999%), because that's all the service requires and/or that's what the market will tolerate for the service provided at a given price-point.
These kinds of decisions *are* "a little more entreprenural attitude."
5 - NewsVeiws
Yeah, *sigh* seems Blogger is off-line. As in TOTALLY. Any and all .blogspot.com URL's (including my own) come up dead.
I posted (and it appeared to accept my post) then tried to look at it and NOTHING. Timed out. Tried other .blogspot.com blogs I like to visit and NOTHING. Timed out. No idea when it will be back online...
6 - Elvira Black
I feel the pain too, esp with Technorati these days--a definite love/hate relationship. Thing is, that we are so "hard wired" at this point into these services and the internet in general, that if they're down we're incredibly "vulnerable." It's similar in scope to a blackout--except that instead of electricity, it's the free flow of information that is being witheld.
But Steven's point seems to be well taken too--I can see the day coming soon when Blogger et al may start charging for their services....maybe.
7 - David Sifry
Your points are well taken, and we've been hard at work increasing the reliability and uptime of Technorati over the past few months. Things still aren't where I'd personally like them, so we continue to spend a lot of time and money making the service work 100% correctly, 100% of the time. That's the goal.
Having said that there is the matter of economics - at the same time that we're improving the current services, we're building out new services like Explore and Blog Finder among others. Building the revenue stream from these services is pretty important too - I want to make sure that Technorati is around for you for a long long time!
Correctness, completeness, responsivenss, and up-to-the-moment results are top priorities for us at Technorati, but we haven't been all that responsive lately as our traffic and users have grown over the last months. We're working on fixing that, and your comments are taken very seriously. I hope that you continue to stick with us while we work out the issues we have, and please don't hesitate to send me feedback or comments at dsifry AT technorati DOT com or give me a call at 415 846-0232. It's our mantra to be of service to you, and to be continuously improving. I hope that we can do that for you...
Dave
8 - Zoli Erdos
Thanks for quoting me - no, I am not surprised by the biggie's performance problems, see salesforceless.com .
Ironically, continuitycentral.com/feature mentioned in a comment above timed out on me .. got it at the second attempt, but loaded very slow. I agree with their point though: those last few 9's are getting prohibitably expensive.
I would argue that the right level for most Salesforce.com customers is "3 nines": 8 hours 46 minutes. This is a maximun of 1 business day.
99.95% means 18 days down that is way too much.... 99.99 is only an hour but expensive - may be worth for critical businesses, but this is where tiered SLA's and tiered pricing will have to come in the picture.
For a free service like Blogspot, 3 nines would still be ideal, but the hard fact is, even at 99.95, abut a day and a half a month, the crowd will stay, since it's free - you get what you pay for. The lack of communication is unacceptable though. Yesterday I wrote a stupid little piece on Blogspot's outage, and within minutes I got a lot of pagehits. They all were Google Blog Searches, with the argument "blogspot down". Apparently my post became the 4 th item listed for that search. This is ridiculous, and shows the lack of REAL information. (Thanks for indexing my blog surprisingly fast though, Google).
9 - Phillip Winn
Retail environments don't tend to be up 24/7, and don't *tend* to be high-volume from a computer standpoint, so they certainly don't need five-9s. 24-hour grocery stores are an obvious exception, but generally, they just don't.
Websites are different. The web is 24/7/365 around the world.